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EROTIC FICTION, PURITAN CENSORSHIP AND GYNAECOLOGICAL DETAILAn Interview With Jack FritscherPublished January, 2010INTERVIEW BY BRUNO BAYLEY, PHOTOS BY MARK HEMRY
Jack Fritscher is the award-winning author of hundreds of stories and articles, and 20 books including Gay San Francisco, Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, and his memoir of his bicoastal lover, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. He is the founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of the legendary international leather magazine Drummer. He is about as informed as anyone on the history of erotic fiction, its importance, and the state of erotic publishing today. According to him, religion and nipple clamps were invented for the same reason, namely that everyone likes being bottom of the domination pile. Vice: What do you think of the old joke about the difference between erotica and pornography merely being a matter of the lighting? Exactly where does the boundary lie? Jack Fritscher: Boundaries are frontiers. Trapped in Bloomsbury, Lytton Strachey dared say “semen” and changed London. What was porn yesterday is literature today. Fanny Hill, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Naked Lunch, and the leather lyrics of gay British poet Thom Gunn have all become pop-culture child’s play. I waffle my linguistics between porn and erotica depending if I’m talking to a sex seminar or to church ladies. I’m not concerned about labels. The endless debate about erotica and porn is an Occam’s razor important mostly to politically correct academics and to religious fundamentalists. Vice readers, living in the slipstream of fundamentalism sweeping the world, might take action to ensure that censorship does not bring back the “old school” closet of having to “read between the lines”. In the American fundamentalist theatre of the absurd, seven of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs were put on trial in Ohio during 1990 to determine if they were erotica or porn. I have a certain insight in that I was Mapplethorpe’s bicoastal lover, and, as editor of Drummer magazine, I assigned him his first cover before he was world famous. While I thought Robert’s content and style beautiful, I doubt to this day if, for all his vaunted “porno”, anyone has every masturbated to a Mapplethorpe photograph. All seven were deemed to be non-pornographic. Regarding the seesaw between erotica and porn, my longtime pal, the London art critic Edward Lucie-Smith, pointed out, “A Mapplethorpe photo of a calla lily hanging in the dining room gains frisson from the Mapplethorpe fisting photo hanging in the bedroom.” So, basically, there is no definite line to draw between the two? About the impossibility of defining pornography, Justice Potter Stewart, in the most famous phrase ever uttered by the US Supreme Court, said he couldn’t define it, but “I know it when I see it.” Porn is personal. I’m an author without borders. I write gripping tales for prehensile readers. I don’t write porn. I write literary erotica that begins in the head and works its way down. In the alchemy of eros, if readers cum, it is they defining what is erotica and what is porn. You earned a doctorate for your dissertation Love and Death in Tennessee Williams. Was that the start of your interest in erotic writing, or was it the culmination of an amateur interest that then became a profession. As the conformist 1950s became the liberated 1960s, I read Tennessee Williams to learn about sex because I was an innocent student stranded in a Catholic seminary. After reading five Williams plays, I ended my 11 years of study, exited the seminary, came out into the world, and met Tennessee Williams. He was an archetypal artist making sexuality intelligent and literary in Baby Doll, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Suddenly Last Summer. In the ironic alert inherent in censorship, when I was eight years old, a shrieking priest in a pulpit had inadvertently made me aware of Forever Amber, the bestselling novel of the 1940s that was condemned by the Catholic Church’s delirious Index of Forbidden Books. Growing up like most Catholic intellectuals, I made the Index my reading list for classic literature. Censorship, conveniently citing page references, guided me to the forbidden passages in Flaubert, Balzac, and George Sand. The Index condemning all works by De Sade, Zola, Sartre, Moravia, and Gide, was also threatening Tennessee Williams when its Inquisitional reign of terror was stopped by Pope John XXIII. Pumped up on the Index, the Catholic Legion of Decency listed films whose viewing would send me to hell, or at least to the library to borrow the filthy books adapted by Hollywood. When the priest who was my high school English teacher lectured on Walt Whitman, he said Leaves of Grass was literature, but too dirty for boys. I immediately wrapped the book in a plain brown wrapper. Expecting a sex panic, I fell into aesthetic rapture that exposed the sex hysteria in my bourgeois education. Excited in my Speedo, I was Whitman’s “twenty-ninth bather” swooning with lust. That shock of recognition is the heart of erotica when sex and desire validate identity with the great “Yes!” of a cum shot: “OMG, I really am gay!” See all articles by this contributor
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